What we’re about
We're a community that practices and discusses philosophy, being free and open to all levels and backgrounds. We offer seminars, a variety of discussion formats, and the occasional lecture / guest speaker.
Many meetings will have fewer RSVPs than people who actually attend. This is because overtime people stop making use of Meetup.com and instead communicate with their groups via Discord, Slack, Zoom, E-mail, or similar You can think of the list of events hosted on this Meetup as advertisements for groups seeking new participants.
Our philosophy offerings are organized and facilitated by volunteers. If you have a philosophy offering - or an offering that compliments the study of philosophy, such as in literature, the sciences, and so on - that you'd like to advertise through this Meetup, please contact the organizer. We're grateful to those who want to enrich Portland with study and discussion!
Participants must speak, write, and act in a considerate, professional, and respectful manner, and be prepared for the meetings that they attend, having reviewed the materials to the degree necessary to participate. If you haven't reviewed the materials but still wish to attend an event, please consult the event facilitator regarding the best manner for you to be present.
We look forward to studying philosophy together!
Upcoming events
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•OnlineAristotle's Dialectic - Topics I - Live-Reading--European Style
OnlineNovember 18 - We will read Topics, Book I Chapter 2, at Bekker line 101a25.
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We are using the translation by Robin Smith: Topics Books I & VIII (Oxford University Press, 1997), page 2.
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Smith in his helpful "Introduction" forewarns us that because we don't know what we are ignorant of, we barbarians don't know yet what dialectic is or why we need it. So there will be learning pain involved as we bootstrap ourselves toward knowing and practicing what we will learn. The payoff will be tremendous and will be commensurate with personal effort.
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A new reading adventure beckons you and your willpower. Join us.
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Organon means "instrument," as in, instrument for thought and speech. The term was given by ancient commentators to a group of Aristotle's treatises comprising his logical works.
Organon
|-- Categories ---- 2023.02.28
|-- On Interpretation ---- 2023.12.12
|-- Topics ---- 2025.10.21
|-- Sophistical Refutations
|-- Rhetoric*
|-- Prior Analytics
|-- Posterior Analytics
(* Robin Smith, author of SEP's 2022 entry "Aristotle's Logic," argues that Rhetoric should be part of the Organon.)
Whenever we do any human thing, we can either do it well or do it poorly. With instruments, we can do things either better, faster, and more; or worse, slower, and less. That is, with instruments they either augment or diminish our doings.
Do thinking and speaking (and writing and listening) require instruments? Yes. We do need physical instruments like microphones, megaphones, pens, papers, computers. But we also need mental instruments: grammar, vocabulary words, evidence-gathering techniques, big-picture integration methods, persuasion strategies. Thinking while sitting meditatively all day in a lotus position doesn't require much instrumentation of any kind, but thinking and speaking well in the sense of project planning, problem-solving, negotiating, arguing, deliberating--that is, the active doings in the world (whether romantic, social, commercial, or political)--do require well-honed mental instruments. That's the Organon in a nutshell.
Are you an up-and-coming human being, a doer, go-getter, achiever, or at least you're choosing to become one? You need to wield the Organon.
Join us.2 attendees
•OnlineQuanta and Complementarity – The Philosophy of Niels Bohr
OnlineOur mission during this session is to understand what is meant by "quantum contextuality", and to consider the implications for interpreting QM.
Contextuality is one of the most characteristic features of QM. Historically the concept goes back to Bohr's emphasis on the importance of specifying the complete experimental arrangement, and Heisenberg's formal discovery of the uncertainty principle in the case of non-commuting observables. Von Neumann's infamous 1932 "proof" of the impossibility of hidden-variable interpretations relied on a strong assumption that such variables must be "non-contextual", and thereby helped to define the issue.
Although the assumption of non-contextuality in Von Neumann's demonstration was later recognized to be too strong, over 30 years later Bell, Kochen and Specker tightened the argument, and successfully demonstrated that QM is contextual, and that no non-contextual hidden variable formulation is possible.
This result is often viewed as confirming Bohr's ideas of complementarity and the interdependence between measurement contexts and outcomes, although other interpretations of QM can accommodate contextuality. For example, the de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave theory is explicitly contextual (unfortunately in a way that violates special relativity).
Exercise: How does Everett's Many-Worlds interpretation account for contextuality?
The Kochen-Specker (sometimes Bell-Kochen-Specker) theorem is mathematically complex. Meetup participants can skip the details of the proof as desired, but are encouraged to familiarize themselves with the conceptual framework.
Reading assignment
- "The Spooky Quantum Phenomenon You’ve Never Heard Of"
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-spooky-quantum-phenomenon-youve-never-heard-of-20220622/
- "Contextuality — The most quantum thing"
https://plus.maths.org/content/contextuality-most-quantum-thing
- "Quantum contextuality in theCopenhagen approach"
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10.1098/rsta.2019.0025
Optional resources
(none of these are required for our meeting!)
- A simple YouTube video "Kochen–Specker Theorem Explained" -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqTmxg4LhSk
- Gemini summary of video:
https://gemini.google.com/share/1984cb3416d0 - "K-S proofs made simple" (generated with the help of Perplexity AI)
- Wikipedia articles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_contextuality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kochen%E2%80%93Specker_theorem
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kochen-specker/
- A rigorous and more complex YouTube lecture by the late, great John Conway: "Conway Free Will Theorem Lecture 2- Kochen-Specker Theorem"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hox6ZIj7JPI&t=102s
For those who want to delver even deeper, please see the footnotes in the "K-S proofs made simple" document!
Meeting information:
Our live meeting will take place on Zoom.
Text-based discussions during and between live meetings will be hosted on the Blinding Cyclops Discord server. You can also find resources related to this seminar and reading assignments there. Join link: https://discord.gg/urPBsNTWuK. Channels related to this seminar can be found under the "Quantum Physics" category.
Syllabus:
We meet alternating Fridays at 4pm PT to discuss interpretations of quantum physics and the philosophy of Niels Bohr.
This seminar has begun with a close reading of a book critical of Niels Bohr, “What is Real?” by Adam Becker, so that we can become grounded in an opposing and critical viewpoint. It's also likely that we'll semi-regularly read source materials as a supplement.
Suggested secondary readings (which we’ll not cover directly but which may be referenced):
- “Quantum Reality,” by Nick Herbert
- “Beyond Weird,” by Philip Ball
- “Elegance and Enigma,” edited by Maximilian Schlosshauer
6 attendees
Past events
4270
